architectureits infrastructure, transaction systems, and application portfolio has been focused on internal operations and efficiencies, not on interacting with trading partners and customers. In various industry value chains, for example, the application portfolio of the dominant firm in the value chain exerts  a  strong  influence  on  how  its  trading  partners  interact,  both  with the  dominant  company  as  well  as  among  the  trading  partners.  This dominant  application  influence  often  forces  trading  partners  to  embrace the  nuances  of  that  architecture  and  the  interfaces  to  the  ERP  appli- cations. In an SAP-centric extended enterprise, trading partners will have to interface to SAP to exchange forecasts, purchase orders, and other B2B transactions. However, in todays business world, collaboration with trading partners is fast becoming the rule, not the exception. Companies understand that signifi- cant  benefits  can  be  realized  through  better  cooperation  and  information sharing with their customers and suppliers. Their existing application portfo- lios, however, are not built for collaboration across the firewall with outside agencies. Web services offer a way to bridge the gap and overcome the legacy of internally-focused IT architectures and application portfolios. Business Process Collaboration Web  services  will  enable  business  collaboration  at  the  process  level. Process-level collaboration requires new software architected for collabora- tion across corporate firewalls. Web services will be the foundation for cre- ating  these  new  applications.  Business  Process  Collaboration  (BPC), augmented by electronic means over the Internet, has wide-reaching impli- cations for the ways in which business will be performed. Many organiza- tions have not had the discipline or desire to focus on business processes as a legitimate pursuit, largely as a result of the ongoing backlash against the business process re-engineering phenomenon of the 1980s. However, as the word collaboration has entered the mainstream dialog of business and IT  professionals,  the  sharp  edge  of  re-engineering  has  been  dulled. Collaboration  as  a  discipline  is  on  the  rise  as  the  Internet  continues  to thread its way into organizations around the world. We can simply define collaboration as cooperation to achieve a particular goal or goals. Collaboration involves teaming, sometimes with competitors, to achieve a higher, shared purpose. This is sometimes called co-opetition, which refers to the periodic vacillation between competing with organizations and cooperating with organizations based on market dynamics, competitive pres- sures,  or  other  business  forces.  Collaboration  has  been  around  in  various forms for many years, including incipient technology implementations such as Electronic Data Interchange (EDI), point-to-point interfaces between applica- tion  systems,  and  other  means.  What  is  different  is  that  the  Internet  has A Day in the Life of a CIO 15 74188_WY_Marks_01  2/5/2003  4:08 PM  Page 15